The CRiS research area Security, Prevention & the Police focuses on the criminological study of security. Questions and issues of security gain importance in societal discourses and increasingly penetrate citizens’ everyday life. These developments highlight a ‘thin blue line’ between issues as security and insecurity, order and disorder, legitimacy and abuse, control and repression, surveillance and privacy, and preventive and repressive measures. Therefore, the research group endeavoured sociological studies of the police, with in particular the study of routine practices, surveillance practices, citizen-police interactions and occupational cultures. Insights in the function of the police and the police organisation, as the main governmental body to respond to criminal and/or disorderly behaviour, contribute to a more democratic and legitimate police force and to the debates concerning security and freedom in our society. Consequently, our research is more and more focused on governmental views and responses regarding phenomenon of insecurity: notably prevention policies and federal and local government security policies, the privatisation of security issues, the increasing use of information communication technologies by the police and the creation of new security initiatives. We are, however, also interested in investigating the role of citizens and how they at times cooperate with and resist police authority.

The CRiS research line Penality and Society is coordinated by Profs. Kristel Beyens and Sonja Snacken.
It focusses on criminological, sociological and socio-legal research of the penal and para-penal institutions, their actors, cultures and social practices, in interaction with political and social developments in late-modernity. Our current research focusses on penal decision making and discretion (sentencing and sentence implementation) and the institutions of punishment, i.e. prisons, centers for electronic monitoring and the houses of justice. More particularly, researchers of this research line publish on the issue of prison overcrowding and changing prison populations, prisoner’s rights, prison staff, elderly prisoners and situations of extreme dependency, non-national prisoners and crimmigration, pains of imprisonment, prison architecture, prison food, social reintegration, and the imposition and implementation of community sentences, such as the work penalty, probation, electronic monitoring and conditional release. Recently, our interest focusses on compliance and breach.
Since the last years the penology research also focuses on detention and expulsion of irregular migrants, in the context of prison and of immigrant detention centers. Most of these topics are studied from a national and international comparative perspective.

Related Research Projects

Capstone of the custodial sentence. A comparative research on the practices of parole in Belgium and the Netherlands.Researcher: Maaike M. Beckman – Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Kristel Beyens – Co-supervisor: Prof. Dr. Miranda Boone

The CRiS research area Youth Justice Studies elaborates on contemporary social and scientific developments and debates, and is in particular concerned with the following four research lines:

A first research line concerns the historical perspective on youth, deviant behaviour, crime and its treatments. This pioneering research has been performed by using rich archive files and other historical sources.

A second research line focuses on the youth protection system as a legal system and on the tensions and questions which are being developed in this particular field. Legal-criminological questions are being examined, such as process guarantees of prosecuted minors and the children-rights legal frameworks. Recent research in this context highlights and discusses the communication in juvenile courts and the interactions during police interrogations of juvenile suspects.

A third research line focuses rather on questions which must be situated within the practice of the social response to young people and their alleged deviant, problematic or delinquent behaviour.
The research elaborates on alternative sanctions practices, or the placement of minors in community institutions.

A fourth research line which is being developed, includes research topics that discuss the social phenomenon of young people and their (delinquent) behaviour in the society. Our research here discusses for example evolutions in youth delinquent behaviour or self-reported delinquent behaviour. Also, the study of background characteristics and their interaction with paths of young people in youth protection systems, as well as the study into desistance and repetition of offences.

Crime & the city is an interdisciplinary group within the department focused on crime within the context of the city.
It crosses the borders with urban geography, sociology, urban politics, planning, architecture and psychology.

The goal of Crime and Society: New Challenges, is to cooperate between the four lines of research in the research group, i.e. penality, youth studies, policing and security, crime and the city, to approach some cutting-edge areas in an integrated manner, simultaneously transcending the various areas of crime control and public order in addition to the traditional criminological areas linked to them.